


Left and Loved

by erinaceous



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Nightmares, Oneshot, Sleepy Cuddles, obscure literature references, oh hey looks like i found my niche
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-28 06:15:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11411961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erinaceous/pseuds/erinaceous
Summary: Jaal has a lot of reasons to keep fighting, but it is she who holds his heart in her alien hands.





	Left and Loved

Jaal woke, as he so often did, from a nightmare. 

The visions his dreaming mind conjured no longer disturbed him the way they did the younger recruits, whose cries and whimpers would drift over silent camps and dorm rooms. He'd long since mastered the art of using his fear as fuel to keep fighting, and since joining up with the Pathfinder and her crew, fear was not something he lacked. _Dos-ashaan_ , his people called it. Good fear. For any horror sleep could bring him, he'd devised both a way to reassure himself and to keep pushing on in the fight against the kett. 

When his dreams showed him watching helplessly, paralysed, as his skin turned black and his blood turned green at the tip of a kett cardinal's syringe, he would wake and run his hands over his very angaran body, all the grooves and ridges and smooth skin, and check the hidden sheath beneath his rofjinn, where he kept a second _firaan_. This was for a different kind of self-defense than the one he carried on his hip. Jaal would never be exalted, because the kett would never take him alive. 

When it was his mother being abducted by the kett, Jaal reminded himself that her role as a communications officer in the Resistance meant she rarely saw combat, left Havarl even more rarely, and the kett were mercifully absent from the angara's mother planet. Besides, even if the kett did ever get their filthy claws anywhere near Sahuna, he had a feeling they were in for a nasty surprise. She was a Darav, after all. 

It was more difficult when he saw his siblings meeting that fate, and those were the visions he kept locked away, never to be dwelled upon. It was a possibility for anyone in the Resistance, but he had to trust that any sibling of his could take care of themselves. 

In the last few months, though, the nightmares had changed from imagined, if horrific, scenes to memories relived in explicit detail, situations over which he had no control. He'd seen his fair share of horrors in the Resistance, but those were all routine, in a way. He had never had a chance to prepare himself for some of the things he'd seen as part of Sara's crew. Before then, his dreams of the kett had been vague, but the reality of exaltation had made them so much worse. Other times, he woke up with the scent of salarian blood still on his tongue. 

And now there was a new terror to add to his collection. The incessant pounding of Drack throwing his entire body weight against a Remant door they had no hope of opening, his own desperate attempts to call the _Tempest_ for help (how would medical help even reach them? At the time, Jaal had not cared), his beloved Sara collapsed in a heap on the floor, SAM ripped from her and her chest terrifyingly still. When she woke, that first stuttering, wheezing gasp had been more beautiful than any yevara's song, but in his nightmares, the silence stretched on into eternity. 

Waking up from a vivid dream was always disorienting, but this time Jaal lay there for a moment, totally confused. The room was dark—where were all the blinking lights on the tech lab's equipment?--the bed was too soft, and he was uncomfortably hot. 

It took a moment for him to make sense of the last few hours—they were speeding towards Meridian, after the Archon and Sara's stolen brother. They had a fleet of Remnant ships at their side, and if they succeeded, they could have a home for all of Heleus by the time the day was over. 

Winning Meridian could solve all of his people's problems, but it was the cost of such a prize that truly frightened Jaal, something he was only too aware of with Sara Ryder sleeping with her head on his shoulder and her legs tangled with his.

She had asked him to sleep with her (that was it, why he felt so hot. She seemed to enjoy being bundled up like some kind of burrowing animal). Not in the way that humans often meant that, which as far as Jaal was concerned was an odd idiom anyway since Sara's naked body made sleeping the last thing on his mind, but they had a few hours before they reached Meridian and Sara had chosen to spend it asleep. 

After Lexi had finished her fussing once they'd left Khi Tasira, she had sought him out, as he knew she would. _I'm just so fucking tired, Jaal,_ she had said, pressing her face against his neck, and he would have carried her to bed had he not been sure she'd hate for someone to see. Once in her quarters, he had swept her up into his arms and settled against the pillows with her tucked up close to him, one arm circling her waist and the other stroking soothing circles on her back, where her shirt had ridden up. It wasn't the most comfortable position for him, but he'd dozed off anyway, not even feeling his own exhaustion until then. 

For a moment Jaal simply watched her sleep. Her breath was hot on his bare chest, rhythmic puffs of warm air that matched the rise and fall of her ribcage, and her eyes twitched erratically beneath her eyelids. He hoped her dreams were more peaceful than his.

In that moment Sara was so quietly _alive_ , warm and breathing and dreaming, that Jaal couldn't stop the tears. Everything had happened so quickly, he hadn't been able to stop and _feel._

He closed his eyes, leaning down to press his nose into her hair. She smelled fresh from the shower, like something floral—hibiscus, he thought it was, some Earth flower that wouldn't look out of place on Havarl—but there was something else barely masked by her shampoo, something musky and warm that he could only describe as _human._

Jaal held her closer, as close as he dared without waking her. He wanted to gently pull aside her loose t-shirt and slip her shorts from her legs and kiss every inch of her skin he could reach, but he would not rob her of these few precious minutes of sleep. When all this was over, he decided, he was going to take Sara somewhere peaceful and quiet and she was going to have a damn rest, whether she liked it or not. She deserved better than a few moments of slumber snatched between near-death-experience and suicide mission. 

The thought that he had almost lost her was unbearable—even worse was that he had lost her, back on the Archon's flagship, when he had not even known _what_ he'd lost. It was only through the miracle of the AI in her head that she was nestled in his arms now. He'd cared for her then, of course, but Jaal cared for a lot of people: Liam and Evfra and Sahuna and Vetra and Cora and even Scott, whom he had only met through the often-unflattering stories Sara had shared with him, were all impossibly dear to him in their own ways. They were not Sara, though. She was special. 

What was that play he'd been reading in the Nexus's Cultural Centre just a few days ago? He couldn't remember the title, but one line had stuck with him, and it came back to him now— _better to be left than never to have been loved_. He couldn't remember much about the play other than how much he'd hated it, but that one line rang true. If this all went wrong, he had this moment. The Archon could take his family, rob his people of their genes, their souls, their home, but he would not take this. 

Despite his best efforts to keep his sobs silent, Sara began to stir, probably woken by the distressed noises rumbling up from his chest that had to sound unsettlingly alien to her ears. Her breath hitched and then she sighed, eyes fluttering open. A bleary smile graced her features when she looked up at him, but it quickly faded into concern when she noticed him crying. 

“Y'okay?” she murmured, voice husky from sleep.

Jaal sighed heavily. His instincts told him to be upfront about his feelings—that he was scared senseless for the safety of the woman who held his heart in her alien hands—but if there was one thing he'd learnt from serving on a human ship, it was that sometimes honesty wasn't always the best path. He decided to strike a balance.

“I am only anxious about the coming battle, my darling.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “Please, go back to sleep. You still have a few minutes to rest.”

She shook her head. “I want to spend them with you.” Her movements sluggish, she reached up and brushed her hand over his cheek, wiping his tears away. Jaal sighed and leaned into her touch, before catching her hand in his own, slotting his two digits between her four. He pressed his lips to the back of each of her fingers, and then her palm, before leaving a trail of kisses down to her wrist, where he lingered. Her skin was so thin he could see the veins beneath it, feel her heartbeat unnervingly close to the surface. 

Finally meeting her eyes, Jaal pressed one final kiss to her pulse point, and prayed to all the stars watching over them that this would not be the last time he felt her blood flowing beneath his lips.

**Author's Note:**

> What is it about these two that makes it so easy to write angsty fluffy cuddly drabbles????
> 
> The play Jaal is referencing is The Way of the World by William Congreve. If he's reading up on human history in the Cultural Centre then that would probably include literature, and this play is significant because it was one of the works that marked the end of the Restoration era of literature. This particular quote is kind of an earlier version of the more famous "'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" from Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H, but I haven't actually read that poem so I used Congreve's version instead. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ I really like this play tbh, the characters are all awful and everyone's shagging or related or both. It's great.
> 
> Also quick question: I have a fair few Sara/Jaal prompts I want to fill as well as some of my own stories, and sorta possibly maybe something a bit longer. Are you guys okay with default Sara or should I use a custom appearance/name ect? I really like Sara's default appearance (and also with the amount of hate she got pre-launch i love her out of spite as well ok but that's just me ok) but I've read that for some people they prefer a unique name and appearance? idk. My Ryder looks like a cyberpunk emo kid though so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


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